America Online will develop a new portal with the goal of
connecting individuals with charitable organizations and helping
nonprofits find resources on the Net.

"What we're trying to do is make it easier for individuals
to help nonprofits, either through volunteerism or donations
[or by connecting] nonprofit organizations with the resources
that help them build their technical capacity," said Michele
Cavataio, an AOL project director for the yet-to-be-named portal.

"It's not branded by AOL
at all," continued Cavataio. "We're going to help promote
them though our service, but it's not just for AOL users."

When the site goes up in September, users will be able to
search for charities geographically and by topic. The site will
offer nonprofits a Web publishing toolkit and include a calendar
of events and other features, said Cavataio. She offered few
other details of the venture.

"We're trying to put rocket boosters under the efforts
that are already in place in the philanthropic community,"
she said. "Our strength is in aggregating information and
making it easy to use."

But a nonprofit Web site may have beat AOL to the punch.

Guidestar has undertaken
the monumental task of publishing online the full text of financial
disclosure forms for more than 300,000 IRS-sanctioned nonprofits.
The database details almost every aspect of a nonprofit's operations.

"We're going to distribute this information and publish
it so that people can look at it and see how it's changing over
time," said Guidestar spokeswoman Alison Brody.

Like the upcoming AOL site, Guidestar's user-friendly site
also helps individuals find out about volunteer and donation
opportunities. Additionally, it features news reports and a "learning
center."

Giving money to nonprofits is currently like investing in
for-profit companies without have the benefit of tools like Edgar, a database of
public filings used by investors to research publicly traded
companies, Brody said.

Guidestar hopes its database will change that, and at the
same time help nonprofits to meet new IRS requirements for making
the information available, she added.